Truevent is a search engine built on top of the Yahoo! boss api.

I was talking to a search researcher about their offering.

researcher: i think the underlying theory is a bit overstretched...

researcher: well, i think there's nothing new about it

Paul Birnie: you mean the linking of words associated to other words

Paul Birnie: well at least boss is achieving something - making lots of people try different things

researcher: they fed the system with documents about eco-stuff

researcher: modeled, somehow, the word patterns

Paul Birnie: like simple signature detection

researcher: and now do some kind of re-ranking of boss-results based on the similarity to that model

6 easy steps to making a fortune by creating a cool vertical search engine startup based on the boss api are:

  • signup for the boss appid
  • use the boss mashup framework to retrieve search results from boss api
  • pull data from another webservice at the same time
  • mix and rerank the results based on some "patent pending" technology
  • get bought by Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft - either because its good PR or because your product actually works.

The problem with search is it very hard to get users to switch from one search engine to another. All of the major search engines use MLR to do ranking of results and finding a new page feature that can provide >1% improvement in ranking for the average user, is very hard (All the easy and even hard stuff has been done)

Custom vertical search engines:

Creating custom vertical search engines is not new: Google and Yahoo have both supported "site restrict" to create a custom vertical search engine for years

Google provides Google Co-op Custom Search Engine

Yahoo has shut down sitebuilder which also used to support site restrict to a custom list of sites.

afaik. The boss api is currently limited to around 22 site restricts before you run out of space in the GET webservice call. I wonder if POSTS are supported- POSTS are not yos compliant

The problem with the search market is its really hard to get users to switch to another supplier.

Boss mashup framework:

I really like the mashup framework that comes with boss - it allows you to simply instantiate a object and pass a webservice url in the constructor. The mashup framework will automatically find a collection in the response and create a dictionary from the webservice response. You can then write sql-like syntax to mashup (mix) the data returned from each of the services.